This is sort of the standard for earlier editions of D&D, or games that aspire to follow some of the same themes (You might see modern RPGs in this vein referred to as OSR/Old School Renaissance). Historically, players would take on the role of adventurers rather than heroes, and most of the focus was on collecting as much treasure as you can (XP was awarded based on the gold value of treasure).

If you played smart you could certainly keep a character alive, so the idea that older editions of D&D were wantonly fatal isn't really correct, but any time you left your character's fate up to the roll of the dice, you were taking a risk, so the smart play was to rig any such encounter in your favor as best you could. If you did manage to live, your characters would tend to retire, taking ownership of domains, running wizard's towers, etc. - you didn't generally go up ever escalating levels of cosmic threat. Rules and modules existed for that, but it wasn't the type of play people would generally engage in. Instead, your old characters would become NPCs in the game setting, and you'd roll up a new group of adventurers to keep the story going.

3E is probably when the focus shifted to be predominantly around more Big Damn Hero type storylines, and it's firmly cemented as the de facto standard in 5E, but I think the success of 5E shows that that's really what more people are interested in. Which is great! It's been huge for the hobby, and introduced a lot of people into other styles of RPG, including old-school D&D.

Which is a long way to say if this style of play sounds appealing to you, you might want to check out modern OSR games (Mork Borg, Worlds Without Number, Electric Bastionland, Troika!, Mothership) or retroclones (Old School Essentials is probably the biggest name here currently, and is based off of the Basic/Expert ruleset - my personal favorite)

The part I was more surprised by was not the character death. My group has played both 3.5, PF, and 5, and the DM has been more then happy to let us suffer the consequences or poor/stupid choices.

It was more so the aspect of “you run out of characters, you the player can no longer play with us”.

I thought "Players are allowed to take on the characters of their descendants." meant that the group member could stay in the game, just under a new character?

Yes, but also check out the last line on the page about death:

> And yes, players have had their characters die and they have been ejected from The Game.

I find modern players tend to want to be neither of those things. They’re not adventurers or heroes. They’re just some dudes with their own characterization that somehow get looped into a quest and just sort of become very powerful by accident. Self awareness of how ridiculous the typical TTRPG power scaling is makes this pretty common imo.

A random dude, can / should canonically go from level 1 to a pretty high level over the course of an in game month if they’re busy doing things. At which point they’re basically a superhero relative to your average level 0 commoner peasant. Power gains are linear, but it’s a very steep climb.

Yeah, I don't think I'd want to GM or play according to rules like:

https://thegamednd.com/death/

I mean, I get wanting players to invest, and character death to mean something - but kicking out a player after two, three years of weekly sessions because they're "out of characters"? I guess maybe they find time to meet those friends outside of the game too?

Ed: Don't actually know if that's worse, or asking new first time players to never come back because they died first session...

There are some pretty deadly games out there.

Dungeon Crawl Classics has its own special concept related to death for character-development purposes, known as the Funnel.